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waderoush writes "The Google Lunar X Prize, announced in 2007, challenges private teams to send remote-controlled landers and robot rovers to the Moon by December 31, 2015. At the moment, 26 teams are still in the running — but organizers say 2012 could be the shakeout year, as many teams realize they can't go it alone or that they can't raise the tens of millions of dollars needed to reserve a launch vehicle. Xconomy talked with officials at Google, NASA, the X Prize Foundation, and two of the competing teams, asking whether the prize is really winnable in the face of the formidable fundraising obstacles the teams face. The piece also looks at the technology being developed by two of the teams (Moon Express and Team FREDNET), why lunar exploration matters to Google, and how Tiffany Montague, Google's manager of space initiatives, is working to improve the teams' chances."

I'd recommend that google leases a bunch of spaceX heavy rocket, fills it with all the contestants vessels and drop them off in LEO to let them race eachother to the moon in a no-holds-barred robotic deathrace.

No, i'm not. I'm quoting the fixed-costs price range that NASA had someone come up with about 7 years ago. But there is obviously more to the costs than just that. Even more recent estimates are around $20-40 billion. Your trillion dollar estimate is what is silly.

If you want a cannon, use an actual cannon, and not an electromagnetic accelerator. Pipe is way cheaper than than a series of coils and a frickin huge power supply to feed them. These big electromagnetic launchers leave out the part about how they brown out an entire state when launching. One Space Shuttle engine had the equivalent of 4 Hoover Dams power output (8 GW), or 8 nuclear power plants. The StarTram Generation 1 system will need 53 GW for 30 seconds.

We are going to have to move the planet off of the current financial system in order to bring about real work
to accomplish goals like this. Money is a ROAD BLOCK to fully achieving success as a PEOPLE and a PLANET
Cost is not a factor. It is the willingness and willpower of the People who live here to come together and make it all happen.

Money is nominally a store of the value of people's labor(*). That's why we donate money now: we're giving the "liquid" form of our labor to a charity group, so that they can directly buy the products and labor to fill a need.

The existance of Google's competition directly refute your idea. It's private money being staked by Google and the team sponsors that made this price possible. Even governments have to use taxed money: moving the labor from those taxed so that the people in NASA/ESA/etc. can get fed. W

The GP is actually proposing that without money, all the reserves could be spent doing things like this. There would be a single entity that redistributes the excess time/resources to "advance" society in certain directions. It is basically communism without money.

In this case, society would produce food/shelter/energy and we would do away with vehicles, vacations, TV, games, entertainment, luxuries, etc... in order to fund a space elevator that may or may not work; and if it works, may or may not amount

(IMHO, you can argue that money is an energy proxy, and that human energy (i.e. labor) will soon be less valuable than other kinds of energy, but that's an entirely different topic.)

Human energy is already less valuable than other kinds. Why do you think we use construction machinery instead of thousands of slaves for mining and road work. Human energy just doesn't have the bang for the buck that a thousand horsepower diesel motor does.

How, exactly, does this advance science, the public interest, or be anything but a publicity stunt that only the wealthy can participate in? If you're going to 'crowd source' (I despise that phrase), then shouldn't your project be carried out in phases, and as each phase is accomplished a reward is granted to the winning team?

It would be a lot more successful and have more entrants (read: ideas), if the cost of entry wasn't in the tens of millions. Who wants to blow 10 million dollars (or more) to get a 1

Woo, I'm not sure whether I want to talk to you, you seem to have issues. But please explain to me who is going to do a moon shot, who is not independently wealthy, a government, or a major corporation.

Personality is who I am. Attitude is my reaction to you. Don't confuse the two.

I think you're confused about that. And about the concept of social interaction in general.

But please explain to me who is going to do a moon shot, who is not independently wealthy, a government, or a major corporation.

By dividing the project up into smaller, discrete parts which have a sufficiently low entry cost that private individuals and groups can participate in a meaningful capacity.

It won't work. A moon shot is just too big a project to benefit substantively by breaking out a few small parts. By all means, invite participation from one and all but recognize that the core of the project is big and expensive, must be engineere

Assuming for a moment some of the teams might have experience working on commercial earth satellites, wouldn't it still make more sense to have a few milestone events before going straight the lunar rovers? It's a challenge simply getting a craft into lunar orbit, so maybe start there. Landing on the moon is another big milestone, even without the rover component.

I'd love to see a team win this, but they need to have permission to launch reserved by December. None of these teams has a rocket built/purcha

Yeah, but if you are firing a nuke to someone on the other side of the planet, slinging it around the moon gives you plenty of time to get to the target so you can see the look on their face as the nuke hits!

I wonder if a private party could launch a simple, spin-stabilized probe, with well-understood thermal behavoir, that could be used to test the Pioneer Anomally once and for all....all it would need is a clock/ doppler-pinger and a spin and maybe slingshot out of the solar system...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_anomaly [wikipedia.org]

The single biggest problem that any team is facing is getting cash and sufficient cash to pay for a launch. This has been a problem for Astrobotic (and why they have postponed to 2015). This has been an issue for Moon Express. This is an issue for Rocket City Space Pioneers. And, yes, it is an issue for Team Phoenicia (my own team). For FredNet, too.
Getting material donations has not been difficult. Just the $. That's why Team Phoenicia has been selling engines and rockets.
If you want to help and not just snark, go to your favourite team's website and hit the donate button. They all have them. If/. or any other entity would use the/. effect to that end, it'd be a wondrous and helpful thing.

AFAIK, no.
If there is someone to talk to about that, point me that way! That'd be awesome and I'd happily list/. as a backer/sponsor.
That said, if you are looking for an open source team, you are looking at FredNet.
If you are looking for the Silicon Valley big money team, you are looking at Moon Express.
If you are looking at the university student/professor teams, you are looking at Astrobotic, PennState, and Omega Envoy.
If you are looking for the traditional aerospace guys, you are looking at R

The Romanians considered the rockoon approach and discarded it. Instead they are building - yes, really! - a rocket powered seaplane to do an air launch of their rocket carrying their moonbot.
They are nuts.
And they are soooo fscking awesome.
The problem with the rockoon is that even once you are outside the atmosphere, you are still subject to the rocket equation of getting to the moon with the delta V. Some things just don't scale down well.

What are your thoughts on Evacuated Tube Transport as a launch system for the future, or do you have hopes for some other technology? I realize this may be out of scope for your single launch for the moon, but the ETT technology is a fascinating next step that seems elegant to me as an aerospace outsider with an engineering background and would cut down on the actual launch costs. I wonder why the side of a big mountain near the equator is not already a planning site.